Murch said, “What?”
By golly, there was a fight going on in there. The same body – or another one – hurtled out again, this time followed by three men struggling and reeling in one another’s arms like a rugby scrum, and then all at once the entire dispute boiled out of the theater and spread all over the sidewalk.
“Holy Jesus!” said Murch, and watched a body bounce off the hood of the Caddy and back into the fray.
A face appeared at the windshield, and because of the face’s contortion and his own astonishment it took Murch a minute to realize it was Kelp, struggling to get away from a whole lot of people who wanted him to stay. Murch honked the horn, which startled Kelp’s friends, and Kelp scrambled off the hood and ducked into the Caddy.
Murch stared at him. Kelp’s clothing was ripped, his cheek was smudged, and he looked as though he might be getting a black eye. Murch said, “What in hell is going on?”
“I don’t know,” Kelp said, gasping for breath. “I just don’t know. Here comes Chefwick.”
And so he did, tiptoeing across the sidewalk, clutching his black bag to his chest, moving like a ballet dancer in a minefield, and when at last he slipped into the Caddy and shut the door behind himself all he said, wide-eyed, was, “Oh, my. Oh, my.”
Kelp asked him, “Where’s Bulcher?”
“Here he comes,” Murch said.
Here came Bulcher. He could be awesome when he was annoyed, and at the moment he was very annoyed. He had two of his opponents by the neck, one in each great ham-fist, and he was using them as battering rams to clear a path for himself through the melee, poking the two bodies out ahead of himself as he walked, battering them against raiding parties at his flanks, and generally cutting a swath. The path he’d bulldozed on his way into the hall was as nothing to the scorched-earth March To The Curb he effected on the way out. Reaching the Cadillac, he flung his assistants back into the riot while Chefwick opened a rear door for him. Then he hopped into the Caddy, slammed the door, and said, “That’s enough of that.”
“Okay, Stan,” Kelp said. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” Murch looked around, at Kelp beside him on the front seat and Chefwick and Bulcher in back, and said, “What about Dortmunder?”
“He’s not with us. Come on, Stan, they’ll take the car apart next. Drive somewhere and I’ll tell you on the way.”
The car was rocking more than somewhat, from the bodies bouncing off it, and a few of Bulcher’s recent playmates were beginning to look hungrily at him through the windows, so Murch put the Caddy in gear, pressed on the horn, eased away from the curb, and drove them away from there.
It took Kelp two right turns and a red light to explain Dortmunder’s situation, finishing, as they headed downtown, “We can only hope he’ll figure something.”
“He’s stuck in an elevator shaft, with private guards running around?”
“He’s been in tighter spots than that before,” Kelp assured him.
“Yeah,” Murch said. “And wound up in jail.”
“Don’t talk defeatist. Anyway, the guy who lives there is on our side. Maybe he can give Dortmunder a hand.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Murch said doubtfully. Then, deciding to look on the bright side, he said, “But anyway, you did get the painting, right?”
“That part was easy,” Kelp said. “Except when Bulcher thought it was a baseball bat.”
“I got carried away,” Bulcher said.
“All’s well that end’s well,” Kelp said. “Let’s see it, Roger.”
Chefwick said, “Beg pardon?”
Kelp turned a suddenly glassy smile on Chefwick. “The painting,” he said. “Let’s see it.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Sure you do. I gave it to you.”
“No, you didn’t. Bulcher had it”
“Kelp took it away from me,” Bulcher said.
“That’s right. And I threw it to Roger.”
“Well, I didn’t get it.” Chefwick was sounding prissier and prissier, as though defending himself against unjust accusations.
“Well, I threw it to you,” Kelp insisted.
“Well, I didn’t get it,” Chefwick insisted.
Kelp glared at Chefwick, and Chefwick glared at Kelp, and then gradually they stopped glaring and started frowning. They looked each other over, they frowned at Bulcher, they looked around the interior of the car, and all the time Bulcher watched them with his head cocked to one side while Murch tried to concentrate simultaneously on the Friday-night traffic and the events Inside the car.
It was Murch who finally said the awful truth aloud. “You don’t have it.”
“Something–” Kelp lifted up and looked beneath himself, but it wasn’t there either. “Something happened,” he said. “In that fight. I don’t know, all of a sudden there was this huge fight going on.”
“We don’t have it,” Bulcher said. He sounded stunned. “We lost it.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Chefwick said.
Kelp sighed. “We have to go back for it,” he said. “I hate the whole idea, but we just have to. We have to go back.”
Nobody argued. Murch took the next right, and headed uptown.
The scene in front of the theater was not to be believed. The police had arrived, ambulances had arrived, even a fire engine had arrived. Platoons of Scotsmen were being herded into clumps by wary policemen, while other policemen in white helmets trotted into the hall, where the controversy was apparently continuing.
Slowly Murch drove past Hunter House along the one lane still open to traffic, and was waved on by a cop with a red-beamed long flashlight. Sadly Kelp and Chefwick and Bulcher gazed at the concert hall. Kelp sighed. “Dortmunder is going to be very upset,” he said.
Chapter 18
Dortmunder took the subway to Union Square, then walked the rest of the way home. He was in the last block when a fellow came out of a doorway and said, “Pardon me. You got a match?”
“No,” said Dortmunder. “I don’t smoke.”
“That’s all right,” the man said. “Neither do I.” And he fell into pace with Dortmunder, walking along at his right hand. He had a very decided limp, but seemed to have no trouble keeping up.
Dortmunder stopped and looked at him. “All right,” he said. The man stopped, with a quizzical smile. He was an inch or two taller than Dortmunder, slender, with a long thin nose and a bony sunken-cheeked face, and he was wearing a topcoat with the collar turned up and a hat with the brim pulled down, and he was keeping his right hand in his topcoat pocket. Some sort of black orthopedic shoe was on his right foot. He said, “All right? All right what?”
“Do whatever you’re here to do,” Dortmunder told him, “so I can knock you down and go home.”
The man laughed as though he were amused, but he also stepped back a pace, twisting on the lame foot “I’m no holdup man, Dortmunder,” he said.
“You know my name,” Dortmunder mentioned.
“Well,” said the man, “we have the same employer.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Arnold Chauncey.”
Then Dortmunder did get it. “You’re the other guy the lawyer found for him. The killer.”
The killer made a strangely modest gesture with his left hand, while the right remained in his pocket. “Not quite,” he said. “Killing is sometimes part of what I do, but it isn’t my real job. The way I like to think of it, my job is enforcing other people’s wishes.”
“Is that right.”
“For instance,” the killer said, “in your case, I’m being paid twenty thousand dollars, but not to kill you. I get paid whether you live or die. If you give back the picture, that’s fine, you live and I collect. If you don’t, if you make trouble, that’s not fine, and you die and I collect.” He shrugged. “It makes no difference.”
Dortmunder said, “I don’t want you hanging around me the next six months.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” the killer said. “You’ll never see me again. If it’s thumbs down, I’ll drop you from a distance.” Grinning, he took his right hand out of his pocket, empty, made a pistol shape with the fingers, pointed it straight-arm at Dortmunder’s face, closed one eye, grinned, sighted along his arm, and said, “Bang. I’m very good at that.”
Somehow, Dortmunder believed him. He already knew that he himself was precisely the kind of reliable crook Chauncey had asked for, and he now believed that this fellow was precisely the kind of reliable killer Chauncey had asked for. “I’m happy to say,” he said, “that I don’t intend to do anything with that painting except hold on to it till I get paid, then give it back to Chauncey. Fancy is not my method.”
“Good,” said the killer, with a friendly smile. “I like getting paid for doing nothing. So long.” And he started away, then immediately turned back, saying, “You shouldn’t mention this to Chauncey.”